An evening to celebrate Autumn Equinox, to understand the importance of balance, and to enjoy creativity focused around the Seasons.

The evening was held at the Bognor Community Centre where they have a wonderful kitchen, with an area set out with tables and chairs to seat about 30 people. An ideal place to hold a gathering of women!

The evening started with the talking stick being passed around so everyone could introduce themselves. We were pleased to have a group of women attending from the Arun International Women's Day Group (www.aiwd.org.uk) . In total we had a group of 14 wonderful women. Sadly we don't have any pictures available as the camera seemed to have lost them!

Being Autumn Equinox, the theme of the evening was balance, so we went on to discuss balance in our lives. As this was a supper gathering and held in a kitchen, we opened up dialogue about the importance of balance in food, the purchase and the cooking of food. Balance in eating healthy food and allowing ourselves the occasional treat, balance in purchasing food from Fair Trade when we can and cheaper alternatives, and the importance of eating together as a community or family. We also discussed how important it is to eat seasonally as the food not only has more life force energy in it, but it helps us stay in tune with Mother Earth. Preparing food as often as possible also puts nurturing and loving energy into a meal, as opposed to the ready prepared meals we often have to serve up in these busy times.

Then it came to supper time! We had carrot and coriander soup or vegetable soup made by Annabell, followed by banana and rhubarb crumble made by Marie. Scrummy!

The evening continued with a meditation focusing on all of the good things from the summer months, the abundance of the season, and particularly on anything that made us happy. Finding an inner balance in our emotional side from the joys of the long summer sunshine, to the winters cold and shorter days.

With the meditation in mind, we then used our inner findings to create something out of salt dough. The idea being to create an item that reminded us of happy times during the sunshine, that we could hold in our hands when needing a reminder in the darker days of winter.

It was a wonderful evening enjoyed by one and all!

(Please note, we do not go into details of the events at each of these meetings as it is personal to the women who attend.)

Feedback from the day

Love the eating/chatting vibe!

Love the chatting and the company, it was just nice to share. Would like some more creative 'things' next time.

Really nice to meet like minded women. Lovely food and good conversation.

Thank you for organising this lovely meeting and for all the great food! Perhaps a theme for the meetings would be an idea, but it's been great just to share. Thank you!

It's been really lovely meeting all these ladies, very enjoyable and with sharing the food. Thank you

Thank you for your hard work.

Have a lovely evening.

Enjoyable, great food.

Lovely women, warm atmosphere and food great. Thanks, it's been a good evening.

Great evening.

Thanks so much for inviting me.

Great evening but would have been nice to 'mingle' more with each other.

Comments from Annabell and Marie.
Thank you for the lovely comments. Please note we do take on board any suggestions made.

A great evening, but it was very hard work cooking the food and trying to organise the evening, so we decided in future to either get someone else to cook, have a buffet, or organise a 'bring food to share'.
The evening was spent sitting around tables, having taken note of the comment, we now vary the events more to include a purely 'tea and mingle' time at the end.